Vijay Patel Building

SUSTAINABILITY

A commitment to sustainable development

We are passionate about delivering low-carbon buildings and have extensive experience of designing BREEAM Excellent, Passivhaus Certified and operationally Net-Zero Carbon buildings, as well as those which achieve stringent EPC and DEC certification.

We are signatories to the RIBA 2030 Climate Challenge. The Challenge targets a minimum 60% reduction in absolute operational energy demand, and 40% reductions in both embodied carbon of buildings, and their potable water consumption.

Vijay Patel Building, De Montfort University

Credentials

Delivered the UK’s first commercial operationally carbon negative PassivHaus building

Signatories to the RIBA 2030 Challenge

Designed DfE’s Sustainability Pathfinder at Maritime Academy

Certified PassivHaus Designers

Delivered 22 BREEAM Excellent buildings

Signatories to the SME Climate Hub

A Carbon Neutral Practice

We have held ISO 14001 Environmental Management accreditation since 2005, and have been carbon neutral since 2017 - after commissioning our first independent carbon footprint assessment, and offsetting our Scope 1 and 2 emissions via Forest Carbon.

We are committed to reducing the environmental impact of our own activities. Our processes include ongoing monitoring and reduction of our carbon emissions, and through this we have halved our carbon footprint since 2017.

We are signed up to the SME Climate Hub, affiliated with the UN Race to Zero framework. This requires us to halve again our absolute carbon emissions by 2030 and achieve Net Zero Carbon by 2050, as well as to disclose progress each year. We have pledged to better this and achieve net zero by 2040.

We are keen to ensure transparency about our carbon measurement; please contact us for more information.

Holistic Design Approach

Zero carbon design begins at concept stage. We collaborate closely with our clients, design teams, and contractors for an optimal low carbon solution. We take a ‘fabric-first’ approach to ensure that the inherent operational energy demand of the building is minimised, before recourse to additional renewable technologies. Minimising embodied carbon is gaining an increasing focus. We scrutinise all materials and components in our projects; as technical designs progress we assess carbon using proprietary software, enabling us to build a comprehensive picture of the embodied carbon.

Our Work.